Flow: an ecocritical analysis of post-apocalyptic aesthetics
Abstract
The global climate crisis, one of the most pressing challenges of our era, reverberates across scientific, cultural, and artistic domains. Cinema is frequently enlisted to make the climate crisis perceptible and intelligible at the societal scale. In this context, the article examines the Oscar-winning animated film Flow (2024), directed by Gints Zilbalodis, from an ecocritical perspective at the intersection of film studies and environmental studies. The film, distinguished by its minimalist visual language and its absence of dialogue, depicts how animals attempt to rebuild life after humanity is erased by a catastrophic flood. Material ecocriticism, critical posthumanism, and multispecies storytelling are explicitly mobilised in this study to demonstrate how Flow renders water as agential, redistributes narrative attention beyond the human, and stages an ambivalent ethics of co-survival. The deluge motif and the Noah’s Ark metaphor are situated within the movie’s framework of the great flood, in relation to current discussions on climate-induced migration, climate refugees, and the necessity of international solidarity. Flow is selected not only for its recent critical reception and awards recognition, but also because it exemplifies an emergent strand in animated ecocinema: dialogue-free, animal-centred narratives that mobilise sensorial immersion to unsettle anthropocentric frames. This article argues that Flow leverages nonverbal, animal-centred animation to redistribute agency beyond the human, secularise the flood motif by omitting a salvific human figure, and cultivate an eco-phenomenological spectatorship through its atmospheric design.